She takes the long way home and drives past the art installation. The impression is, in fact, disconcerting. The house is gigantic, encrusted with a dark carapace, as if diseased. Her first reaction is, strangely, of shame for the house, as if it were the victim of some practical joke. Then, as she looks, it occurs to her that the artwork is a perfect metaphor for this whole place: a grand structure overrun by controlling, suffocating little bugs. She laughs to herself in the car. Perhaps the artist feels the same way she does. Perhaps this is his—or her?—portrait of the town. She honks the horn a few times in solidarity, and waves as she pulls away.
Entering her own home, she is met with a peculiar, constricted feeling. It is as if she has grown larger, or the rooms have shrunk. This house, like the preschool classroom, seems to have been built for children. Setting her purse down in its usual spot on the kitchen counter, a simple motion laden with habit, she feels a sudden urgency. It has become impossible, she understands, to remain here any longer.
Before she can change her mind, she calls the doctor on his cell phone.
“Hi,” she begins breathlessly. “I want to know, have you been thinking about Paris as much as I have?”
“Camille,” he answers, “hello.”
“I just wanted to say that I’m ready to go when you are.” She takes a breath, feels a weird dizziness. “Let’s do it. Let’s buy the tickets.”
There is an empty pause on the phone, as if the doctor is distracted. After a long moment, his voice comes back clear as the sky. “You’re right,” he says, “we should buy them. I’ll do it. I’ll do it as soon as I have a better sense of my schedule coming up.”
Camille does not respond. It is as if she has been pushed gently into a seat like a little girl. She feels a slug of embarrassment. It had been childish of her to think he would drop everything, leave his patients on the operating table, and board an airplane.
“So,” he says in a different, quieter voice, “would you like to get together tonight?”
At once, her disappointment is flushed away by gratitude. She remembers how fortunate she is to have found this person. Among a colony of creeping carpet beetles, here is a creature with true wingspan, capable of traversing oceans at will.
Still, she does not want to be in the house, does not want to look at the dried paint on the window glass, the old nail holes in the wall that Nick never bothered to patch. With her two hours of freedom, she goes shopping. She bypasses the overpriced boutiques in town and enters the consignment shop. Without looking at the price tags, she holds Paris in mind. In the dressing room, she tries on a low-backed silver dress with a matte sheen. It is too fine for any occasion here, but something she might wear on a weeknight in Paris. This, she realizes, is what attracts her to the European way of life, this offhand glamour in the quotidian: flowers on the breakfast table, aged cheese for lunch.
She turns away from the mirror and views herself over her shoulder. Looking at her own face, she sees an echo of the doctor there. How has she never noticed the resemblance in their features? Now that she has caught it, it is unmistakable. She has heard it said that people tend to be attracted to those they resemble, whose looks are familiar in some way. This is why so many couples look like they could be siblings. It is, apparently, a vanity shared by all.
She buys the dress.
“Good choice,” the saleswoman says at the register. “A designer for the label lives here in town, you know.”
“I didn’t look at the label,” Camille snips.
To her relief, the petition woman is gone when she returns to school. Avis’s teacher meets her eyes in a meaningful way, as if they share a lovers’ secret. Camille takes her daughter’s hand and leaves the building. For the rest of the day, she finds herself thinking about having a child with the doctor. She does not particularly want another child, of course, but finds that it is impossible not to consider it, not to imagine what might arise from such magnetic coupledom. How strikingly gray-eyed their offspring would be. It is a universal impulse, perhaps, to follow this preordained script—Nature’s way of ensuring that humanity continues to invent ever-refined hybrids, lifting the species to new pinnacles.
Later that night on the futon, she lies with her head on the doctor’s chest. Staring at the ceiling, she feels the assertion of his heartbeat, a hidden fist clenching and unclenching beneath her skull. Scanning the ceiling’s blank expanse, her eyes catch on a cobweb in the corner of the room, too high to bother sweeping. This is not a man who would notice such things, she thinks gratefully, although perhaps Madeleine has.
Without bidding, her friend’s warning returns and resonates in her mind. There is no need to know everything about this man, of course. She knows all that matters. Still, she finds herself humoring the question, following its direction lazily.
“So, tell me what you were like when you were a kid,” she asks him.
“I don’t know,” he replies, with an undertone of something like distaste. “Like this, I guess, but smaller.”